Corruption drives dealings with logging companies in the Solomon Islands

Logging companies are eager to get at the remaining timber in the Solomon Islands, but opponents charge that they’re too willing to use underhanded – and possibly illegal – tactics to get the rights to harvest timber in the Santa Cruz Islands.
by Elliot Dawea, John C. Cannon on 1 May 2017 |

The old-growth forests on the island of Nende anchor a unique ecosystem that hold creatures found nowhere else and that have supported communities for centuries.

Logging companies are eager to harvest the island’s timber, which could be worth as much as SI$10 million ($1.26 million).

Scientists worry that logging would destroy everything from the mountain sources of the island’s fresh water to the reefs where sedimentation as a result of logging could kill coral.

Conservation groups and sources from within the provincial government have charged that the companies are using coercion and bribes to convince landowners and development organizations to back their plans to log Nende’s forests.

This is the second in a two-part series on logging in the Solomon Islands. Read the first part for more discussion on the topic.

Several companies are vying for the rights to harvest timber in a far-flung corner of the Solomon Islands. Opponents of the proposed extraction say that the companies are using underhanded tactics to gain access, such as bribing officials and pressuring local landowners.

In interviews with Mongabay, local conservation groups working on the ground have called it “grand-scale corruption.” Individuals from the organizations asked that their names to be withheld for safety reasons.

In terms of the costs of logging, they fear that the logging will fundamentally alter the long-standing livelihoods of the people of Nende, the largest of the Santa Cruz Islands in the southeastern corner of the Solomon Islands. Also known as Santa Cruz Island, and sometimes spelled “Nendo” or “Ndeni” on maps, Nende is home to several species of threatened birds and bats, in large part because of the rich habitats found there.

OceansWatch yachts with the forests of Nende in the background. Photo courtesy of OceansWatch

“There’s a lot of old-growth forest, a lot of primary forest there,” said biologist Ray Pierce, who did a survey of the bats and birds on Nende and two other islands in the Santa Cruz chain in 2014 and visited the islands again in 2016.

But industrial-scale logging could throw off the balance of the entire ecosystem, Pierce said, “from the mountaintop through the streams, right down to the reef and probably over the reef as well.”

Follow the money

Recently, a chain of reports have surfaced from local land owners, those close to the logging companies, and members of the Temotu provincial government, which comprises the Santa Cruz Islands, and they have been published in local newspapers. At issue is a string of payments worth at least SI$236,000 (approximately $30,900), as reported by The Solomon Star News,that timber companies have allegedly paid to key officials and security personnel on Nende, ostensibly in the hopes of galvanizing the support of officials and the permission of local landowners to log their parcels of land.

The exchanges have also raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest. According to a well-placed source contacted by Mongabay who is close to the Nende Resource Development Association, the landowners’ group has received some SI$4 million ($505,449) in payments from the companies.

“Now these loggers are waiting around the clock for which company will be in [favor with] the landowners and the association itself,” another source told The Island Sun in January. Both sources spoke on the condition of anonymity.

It appears now that the association may be leaning toward a situation in which all three companies divide up the land available for timber harvesting. One of these sources also noted that members of the association are much more concerned about the amount of money they have received from the companies – and what they might have to do to repay that debt – than they are about a solution involving sustainable logging.

The Solomon Islands Ministry of Forestry estimates that Nende holds approximately SI$10 million ($1.26 million) worth of timber – if logging of the island is approved. But a recent report found that the Solomon Islands has missed out on more than SI$445 million (about $57.1 million) in export taxes – equivalent of 13.1 percent of the country’s budget – because of its decision to price timber at below-market rates.

One of the logging companies, Malaysia-based Xiang Lin, reportedly received permission from former Temotu Provincial Premier Baddley Tau, who was in power until 2015, to operate on Nende Island through what’s known as a “grant of profit.” A 2015 article in The Island Sun reports that Tau left office amid accusations of “involvement with a logging operation.” Tau admitted his involvement with the logging of the nearby island Vanikoro in a 2015 interview.

However, the Registrar General’s office recently sent a letter to the company’s managing director, Chua Kock Chuan, informing him that the grant of profit was not valid because the Forest Resources and Timber Utilization Act requires that such grants have the consent of the forest commissioner.

The Nende Resource Development Association is the plaintiff in the case, which is now before the High Court of the Solomon Islands with a court date set for June 14. A letter from the Ministry of Lands indicates that Xiang Lin is not likely to succeed in its bid to have its grant of profit validated.

For their part, Temotu province officials refused to issue a business license to Xiang Lin to operate on Nende in February, which Brown Beu, a member of the Temotu provincial government, said was disappointing.

Beu, an Anglican priest, has come under scrutiny lately for payments he said he received from Xiang Lin.

In an interview for Mongabay, he confirmed that, in a visit to the Solomon Islands capital of Honiara, Xiang Lin paid for his stay at the Pacific Casino Hotel, as well as providing him an allowance of SI$3,000 ($379). Internet rates for rooms at the Pacific Casino Hotel are between $108 and 119 (in U.S. dollars) a night currently.

“I deserve such payment and [hotel accommodation] because I work as a local consultant for Xiang Lin,” Beu said, adding that he helps the company prepare its “legal papers.”

Mongabay attempted to reach out to the company directly through several avenues, but contact information was not publicly available. The company only spoke through Beu as its representative.

Another logging company, Solomon Islands-based Tufoal Timber, allegedly spent SI$236,000 ($29,822) in allowances to government officials and security personnel for their attendance at a timber rights hearing on Nov. 18, 2016, in the village of Noipe on Nende, according to a forestry official in the provincial capital city of Lata.

At the top of the list of those receiving money is the most recent former premier of Temotu province, Nelson Omar Menale, who left office at the end of March 2017. Menale confirmed reports in an interview with Mongabay that he had been offered SI$500,000 ($63,181) by Tufoal, a Solomon Islands-based company, to attend the meeting. But he said he only accepted SI$10,000 ($1,264) to pay for beer for his friends and voters in the community.

A source close to Tufoal Timber, who is also a member of the Temotu provincial government, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of safety concerns, saying that one reason officials have been so eager to accept payments is that the province owes “millions” for new construction in Lata, the provincial capital.

The forestry official in Lata, a “non-executive” member of the Temotu provincial government speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Solomon Star News in November 2016 that each police and forestry officer received up to SI$8,000 ($1,011) from Tufoal Timber for attending the meeting. He called the payments – unprecedented in their amounts for the Solomon Islands in his experience – “ridiculous.” Other sources cited in the article claim that their presence was designed to intimidate landowners into capitulating to the loggers’ demands.

Representatives from Tufoal did not respond to several requests for comment.

“[These are] the highest allowances ever paid in any hearing held in Solomon Islands,” the source from the forestry office was quoted as saying in the Nov. 29 article. Typically, these allowances are between SI$100 and SI$200 (approximately $13 and $25), he said.

At the meeting, many landowners consented to have Tufoal come and harvest timber from their land, but critics of the process said they were misled. The Solomon Star News references reports that people who cannot read or write were asked to sign documents.

Six landowners withdrew their consent to log their land at the November 2016 timber rights hearing in Noipe. Since the meeting, 12 additional landowners rescinded their permission for logging on their land, and they are challenging the Temotu provincial government’s decision to approve the timber rights hearing with the Customary Land Appeal Court. They submitted their protest to the Lata Magistrate Court on Feb. 18, 2017, on the grounds that the meeting gained the approval of the provincial government despite protests from landowners and because attendees did not arrive at an agreement at the meeting, which the forestry act requires.

A stream on Nende with Titus Meoblir, a Solomon Islands forest ranger. Opponents of logging Nende argue that the large-scale harvest of the island’s timber could damage healthy watersheds. Photo courtesy of OceansWatch

Divisions arise

Corruption allegations aside, the promise of payments on the one hand and the maintenance of islanders’ livelihoods on the other appear to have fractured the community.

Biologist Ray Pierce said there was a strong contingent on Nende that wanted to preserve the island’s forests when he visited in the fall of 2016.

“The community did seem to be divided,” Pierce said in an interview, “but most of the local village people and the family landowners up in the main forest areas were really not happy at all that the government was going down the track of allowing this commercial logging.”

People have been sustainably using the forests on Nende for hundreds of years, taking a tree here and there when they need to build a house or a boat, Pierce said. He also pointed out that “extensive logging” could disrupt the cycling of freshwater.

What’s more, his surveys in 2014 and 2016 on Nende and Vanikoro, where logging companies began work several years ago, revealed that clearing the old-growth forests on the islands could devastate populations of already-endangered animals, including the Santa Cruz shrikebill (Clytorhynchus sanctaecrucis) and several species of bats.

But sometimes, the promise of cash is too good to pass up in a country where each person’s share of the gross domestic product is under $2,000, according to the World Bank. That’s significantly below what the neighboring countries of Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu pull in, and puts the Solomon Islands in the “low development” category as defined by the UN Development Program.

Payments aimed at convincing landowners to sign over the rights to log their land are commonplace, sources say. Though exact figures are difficult to pin down, Pierce said these “bribes” typically represent “more money than they could dream of really, just to say yes or no,” he said, making it clear how someone might hand over their most precious resource in exchange for a one-time lump sum.

“You could see that they might be tempted.”

The Santa Cruz Islands are located in the southeastern part of the Solomon Islands in Temotu province. By Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa), CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Elliot Dawea is an investigative journalist from the Solomon Islands, currently studying for a bachelor’s degree communication arts, journalism and international relations in Papua New Guinea. He is on Twitter @ElliotDawea. John Cannon is a staff writer at Mongabay and can be reached on Twitter at @johnccannon.

Planet Team (2017). Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://api.planet.com.

Banner image of a logging camp on Vanikoro from Facebook, courtesy of OceansWatch.

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